The story of dashed hopes and sudden halts is a painful yet familiar one for all of us. As we lick our wounds and take stock of yet another lost opportunity, we ask ourselves yet again: can the continent ever escape the boom-bust cycles that have left our economies trapped in middle income status?

The TransPacific Partnership that is currently being negotiated will be neither an apocalypse nor a panacea. But what it will do is provide critical legal and institutional guarantees that will draw Asian investors to Latin America.

The negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership should force a serious discussion of the goals of U.S. bilateral development assistance in the region. As U.S. policy invests more to promote trade integration and link it to global geo-strategic goals, it’s time to think about how to recast development assistance to help countries participate and compete in these new trade agreements.

Too often, U.S. and international coverage of the region falls into manic poles when covering the political and economic fortunes of the region. In reality, the developments in Latin America—and U.S. responses to them—are both more granular and more nuanced than the way the region is portrayed, even in respectable media.